John (Peter Sarsgaard) and Kate (Vera Farmiga) don't have eight children to contend with, but after the miscarriage of their daughter, they adopt, bringing their brood to three. Perhaps they should have cut their losses. The poster for the latest from Jaume Collet-Serra (director of the 1995 House of Wax) warns, "There's something wrong with Esther."

As if the dark, ee-vil eyes of the preternaturally intelligent nine-year-old Russian orphan (Isabelle Fuhrman) weren't a dead give-away. The film's snowy white palette becomes stained with blood not long after the homicidally gifted girl begins playing Russian roulette with her adorable little deaf (yes, lip reading factors into the plot) sister Max (Aryana Engineer) threatens to excise the "hairless little prick" of her brother Danny (Jimmy Bennett) with a box cutter, and grows maybe a tad too close to dad.

Review: Up In the Air No director pulls off the bait-and-switch as craftily as Jason Reitman. He gets you thinking that you're watching a hip, caustic comedy subverting the status quo, but by the end, he's vindicated all the platitudes he seemed to scorn.

Review: Henry's Crime If you had to compare it to a Russian classic, Malcolm Venville's mild comedy about a nobody (Keanu Reeves) who gets busted for a crime he didn't commit might suggest half-baked Dostoevsky or lightweight Gogol.

Review: Knight and Day With a mischievous grin, Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) gazes into the distrusting eyes of June Havens (Cameron Diaz), who’s spent the last 18 hours drugged unconscious, and explains why she’s not wearing her clothes.

Delay of game Splinter Cell: Conviction , BioShock 2 , Heavy Rain — these are just some of the eagerly awaited titles that won't be coming to your video-game console this fall.

Brush up your Porter With its supreme Cole Porter score and its robustly entertaining book by Sam and Bella Spewack, the 1948 Kiss Me, Kate is surely one of the half-dozen best Broadway musicals.

Review: Paris Cédric Klapisch's serendipitous interweaving of the lives of disparate characters in the title city never resorts to the contrivance and manipulation of Paul Haggis's Oscar winner, but there are some close calls.

Autumn garden It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.

Review: Love Happens Half an hour into the screening of this tearjerker from Brandon Camp, three women exited. They made the right choice.

Review: Whip It Add a dash of the sad beauty contests and kooky, dysfunctional family of Little Miss Sunshine to a helping of the bogus hipness and overexposed star of Juno and whip it good and you get an idea of why Drew Barrymore's directorial debut falls flat as a sappy soufflé.

WOMEN WITH SWORDS: KING HU AND THE ART OF WUXIA | March 12, 2013 Decades before women took center stage in the one-two punch of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill , King Hu (1932-1997; the subject of a retrospective at the HFA) put swords in the hands of a soaring heroine in Come Drink with Me.

REVIEW: EMPEROR | March 12, 2013 Yes, Tommy Lee Jones plays the "supreme commander" of the US forces in this historical drama from Peter Webber ( Girl with a Pearl Earring ) that takes place after the Japanese surrender in World War II, and the Oscar winner puts in another towering performance.

REVIEW: 21 AND OVER | March 05, 2013 As one of the Asian stereotypes in this hit-or-(mostly)-miss comedy from writer/directors Jon Lucas and Scott Moore says, "Fuck kids these days. Every one of you is drunk, stupid, and fat."

REVIEW: THE LAST EXORCISM PART II | March 06, 2013 Now that the shaky-cam nonsense has been left behind, what remains are textureless, overlit, sub-TV-quality visuals that only accentuate the fact that our protagonist, Nell Sweetzer (Ashley Bell), is at least a decade older than the 17-year-old exorcised sect-escapee that she's playing.

REVIEW: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER | March 06, 2013 Stop me if you've heard this one before: a farm boy dreams of adventure, finds it, and falls in love with a princess along the way. (For everyone's sake, let's just hope she's not his sister.)